Part 2
“For a while we thought that, mercifully, no life remained in any of the still, sprawling brown figures in front of the _khan_; but presently, with his face covered with the dirt a sniper’s bullet had thrown on it as he put his head up for a look, a man crawled back to report to Major S---- that he had seen a hand feebly raised as though trying to attract our attention. Verifying the truth of the statement at the risk of his big new _shikar_ helmet, S---- promptly called for volunteers to try to bring the wounded man in. ‘It’s a slim chance,’ he said, ‘but this noonday sun would kill an unwounded man lying on his face for an hour out there. We’ve got to make the attempt.’
“Passing down the line, S---- picked the four spryest and wiriest looking of the sprawling row of grimy Tommies, each of whom had raised an appealing hand as the word for volunteers passed along. ‘Make the best of the cover of that strip of date-palms, and bring in the man--he’s the one nearest us--the same way,’ he ordered just about as he would have sent them out on patrol. ‘We’ll give the Turks what diversion we can in the meantime.’
“Then we began peppering the ports of the old _khan_ in a blind and large sort of way that had little effect, as a consequence of the fact that the machine-gun fire which came in reply made it impossible to put our heads up to aim. Enough of a diversion was created, however, to allow the volunteers to make their way, apparently unobserved, to the farther end of the palm clump. But a hail of bullets met them as they left cover, and the last of them dropped while he was still a dozen yards from the object of his rush. The three first to fall lay still,--shot dead, as we learned later,--but the last one, in spite of a punctured femur, presently pulled himself together and began to crawl forward. It was not until this moment, I am certain, that the Turks fully comprehended what we were driving at; for now, although they continued to keep us under cover with sweeping jets from their machine-gun, not another shot was directed at the man on the ground. Nor was there any attempt to check his painful progress as he dragged the man he had been sent after back to the palm grove. Nor yet, finest of all, did the Turks try to wing a single one of another brave four, who, disdaining the cover of the palm trunks, dashed out to relieve their comrade of his burden.
“Encouraged by the forbearance of the enemy, we were about to send out a squad under a white flag to see if any more of the wounded were alive, when dust clouds on the southern horizon warned the Turkish leader that our field-guns were coming up; and, with his task of delaying the pursuit well fulfilled, he made ready to retire by sweeping our cover with a fresh fusillade. The only gate of the _khan_, opening to the south, was completely covered from our position; but the resourceful Turk coolly breached the northern wall with a flake or two of gun-cotton, and, the first thing we knew, the whole troop--machine-gun and all--went scurrying off across the desert. For two or three minutes they were fair marks for us, and, as they sent several Parthian volleys themselves, there was no military reason why we should not have tried to bring down a few of them. As a matter of fact, we did send a few perfunctory volleys; but if its shooting on that occasion was any criterion of the marksmanship of S----’s troop, Allah have mercy on it when it comes to real grips with the Turk! Not one of the fugitives dropped from his saddle, and I don’t think one of them was hit. If we had done for even a man of them, imagine what our feelings would have been when, on taking possession of the _khan_, we found, hung carefully in a thick-walled crypt well beyond all danger from our rifle fire, three goatskins of clear, cold water, while scrawled on the wall, in both French and Turkish, was the direction, ‘For the Wounded.’ As we had been out of water for hours ourselves, and as a few cups sufficed for the two or three wounded who had survived the withering sun heat, you may surmise that our hostility toward the ‘unspeakable Turk’ was not materially increased by this latter incident.
“The chap who was rescued at so great a cost died a few hours later, but rather from exposure to the sun than from his wound, which was slight. The man who brought him in is well on the road to recovery and, I trust, a V.C.”
IV
My next, and what proved to be my last, letter from F---- reached me in London:--
“Our general advance has begun, and we have attained our first important objective in the occupation of the ‘Garden of Eden.’ Not the greater ‘Garden of Eden,’ which name Sir William Willcocks applies to all of Mesopotamia south of Hitt and Samara, but the traditional site of the Garden at the meeting of the Tigris and Euphrates. This was surely one of the strangest engagements in history. The country was under water for miles around, and the Turks had fortified and elected to make their stand on the only dry ground in the whole region, a series of low rises--hardly to be called hills--in the rear of Kurna. Fortunately, their available artillery was not powerful. We had prepared for the assault by emplacing batteries of heavy howitzers at every point sufficiently solid to support them, while lighter guns were mounted on the river-steamers and on barges.
“After a heavy shelling of the Turkish positions our troops, in everything from _balems_ and _gufas_ to _kaleks_ and gunboats, were rowed, paddled, poled, and steamed forward to the limit of the draught of their respective craft. Then over they went into the water, and the assault commenced. Luckily the Turkish guns had been pretty well put out of action by our howitzers, else that half-mile or more through mud and water would have been a very costly business for us. As it was, some barges and _kaleks_ with machine-guns on them were brought up close to the enemies’ lines, and, the fire of these and the gunboats having made the Turkish positions practically untenable, the troops had to do little more than go and round up a very sizeable bunch of prisoners who had been cut off by a swift flanking movement of a column of Sepoys. Some of our men, in their eagerness, went overboard into deep water, and, as a consequence, had to chuck their accoutrements and swim for it. A number of them, in fact, lost more than their arms; and a bevy whom I saw later helping to shepherd some Turkish prisoners aboard a gunboat had little to differentiate them, sartorially, from Father Adam in the earliest days of this same ‘Garden of Eden.’
“I had a rather interesting job a few days ago. This was to lead a small picked force across country and destroy a bridge of boats which the Turks were endeavouring to maintain across the Tigris at the Tomb of Ezra, for the use of any stragglers who might still be drifting back from the south.
“You recall the Bible story of this famous structure. The Prophet Ezra, faring about this region in his old age, feeling the hand of Death upon him, directed his followers to bind his body to a camel, drive the animal into the desert, and where it finally lay down to rest, there to make the holy man’s burial-place. The camel headed straight for the nearest reach of the Tigris, and there the brilliantly-tiled tomb which was reared above the Prophet’s remains stands to this day, a mecca for Jews and Mohammedans alike.
“I didn’t make a very brilliant success of my job with the bridge of boats. We got into a marsh in the darkness and waded about in it until too late to make the night surprise I had counted upon at Ezra’s Tomb. We did get there at dawn, however, and, principally because the Turks must have thought we had strong support coming up, managed to induce the latter to evacuate his very good position about the Tomb and retire to the east bank of the river. We established ourselves in one of the Tomb gardens, but could go no farther for the moment on account of the brisk and accurate fire of the enemy from the other side.
“Most of the day I lay on my back in a bed of petunias under the garden wall, and gorged myself on the ripe pomegranates which the Turkish bullets cut down from the trees above. But about mid-afternoon they knocked a couple of bee-hives off the wall into the very midst of us, and, as we were wearing ‘shorts,’ with nothing to protect the leg from calf to knee, the sequel was a very unpleasant one. So dead sure were those bees that our inoffensive little party was responsible for upsetting their homes that they divided themselves into just as many bands as we were men, and started, impartially and systematically, to sting us to death. My men were out of hand in an instant, and I really believe that, had not a modern miracle been wrought, another minute would have seen the whole pack of us, careless of such trifles as Turkish rifle and machine-gun fire, wallowing in the fifty-yard-distant Tigris.
“The miracle was performed by a little pink-cheeked, bare-footed angel of a Jewess, evidently the ‘shepherd of the bees.’ Unconcernedly tripping out among the writhing ‘casualties,’ oblivious alike to the threat of Turkish bullets and the roaring masses of bees, she set up the punctured hives in a safe place under the wall, and then began to beat sharply with a stick upon an old bronze gong which was suspended from her neck by a thong. Instantly the bees stopped stinging, and inside of five minutes the last of them was settling back with a contented buzz into its hive. I could have kissed the stubby brown toes of the pink-cheeked little angel of mercy. And here again let me record to the credit of the Turks that, although her head and shoulders must have been visible to them above the low wall, they made no attempt to stop with a bullet the work which, had they only known it, was all that prevented the whole lot of us from falling into their hands.
“Every man of us was, of course, in beastly shape from the stings. My own agony from this source was infinitely worse than that from a bullet which ploughed up my scalp when we cut the bridge of boats after darkness had fallen; in fact, if the truth were known, I think the desperate pain all of the boys were in had a good deal to do with the absolute recklessness they displayed when the time came for us to try to fulfil our mission. I heard one chap tell another he was afraid that he _wasn’t_ going to get shot, and the whole bunch acted as if they felt the same way. Luckily, the Turks had no searchlight, and it is probable their own fire helped not a little in breaking up the bridge. At any rate, it went off down the yellow Tigris in a score of sections, and we--or what was left of us--with it. A half-dozen impetuous Turks who, in their eagerness to get at close quarters, had come out to welcome us half-way, were also carried along when the bridge broke up. After that it was a case of _sauve qui peut_ for all of us, and I’m sorry to say that only about a third of the force I started out with has, so far, straggled back to Kurna.”
V
I was still chuckling over F----’s account of his experience with the bees when, opening the latest issue of the _Sphere_ the following afternoon, I saw his familiar face smiling back at me from the corner of one of the first pages. “Been getting mentioned in dispatches,” I said to myself; and then the title of the page, on which appeared a score of other portraits, met my eye: “Dead on the Field of Honour; Officers Killed in Action.” There were no particulars, not even a date; nor was anything further to be learned behind the tape-bound portals of Whitehall. To the officers of F----’s regiment, now fighting in Flanders, some few details were ultimately vouchsafed; and from one of these, whom I encountered a few days ago, during his leave in London, I learned all that I have so far been able to gather concerning the death of my friend.
“F----’s work in cutting the bridge of boats across the Tigris,” he said, “is spoken of as one of the most daring things of the Mesopotamian campaign. Undoubtedly he deserved a V.C. for it, and it is just possible one may be awarded posthumously. He was slightly wounded there, but must have been out on duty again within a very few days. According to the account we have received, he was off on some special detail when he came upon a number of imbeciles of the transport trying to ferry several camels and machine-guns across a back channel of the Euphrates on a _kalek_, a sort of raft consisting of a light platform resting on inflated sheepskins. One of the camels had kicked a hole in the platform and was rapidly demolishing the supporting skins, when F----, fearing the loss of the guns, swam off to try and set things right. In endeavouring to extricate the camel, he ducked under the _kalek_, where, it seems likely, his wounded head was struck by one of the brute’s sharp hoofs, and he let go his grip and sank before any one could get hold of him. Glorious death, wasn’t it,--for a man who had led the life F---- had, and who, for that particular region, was the most nearly indispensable man with the expedition?”
Two months have gone by since F----’s last letter was written, and the Mesopotamian campaign has been prosecuted along the general lines he forecasted at the outset. Nasire and Amara have fallen, and the early winter will see the armies drawn up for the final fight for Bagdad, probably upon that same Plain of Shinar where the scarlet desert flowers still keep alive the old belief that
Never blows so red The rose as where some buried Cæsar bled.
For destiny has decreed that once more the might of two rival races shall lock in death-grips for the possession of that age-old prize, the Garden of Eden. Eve was put without the gates when she tasted of the Forbidden Fruit, and right on down through the ages the same undeviating penalty has been inflicted upon the Babylonian, Mede, Assyrian, and other empires that gorged themselves upon the Forbidden Fruit of Corruption. Brave foeman that he is, the Turk, cloyed with the same Forbidden Fruit, has long been marked for the inexorable justice of the ages, and every precedent of tradition, history, and strategy points to the conclusion that the closing hour of his stewardship of the Garden of Eden is about to strike.
“IT’S A WAY THEY HAVE IN THE AIR CORPS”
I
It had been all of nine years since I first met Horne at an _estancia_ house-party in the heart of the Argentine Pampas, and fully seven since I last saw him at a banquet given at the Buenos Aires Jockey Club in his honour, a day or two after he had led his four to victory in the finals of the River Plate polo championships. Yet, in spite of the pallor of a face I had always remembered as bronzed, and a slight hitch in his once swinging gait, I recognised him instantly--it was the keen, piercing glance, I think, and the sudden flash of white teeth in the quick smile--when he hailed me from a passing taxi and came hobbling back along the broad pavement of Whitehall to meet me.
“What does this mean?” I asked, indicating his jaunty Flying Corps uniform, after we had shaken hands. “I thought it was the army you were in before you resigned to become an opulent _estanciero_ and ‘man-about-the-Pampas.’”
“It was the army I came back to,” he replied, “and I was with my old regiment at Neuve Chapelle when a fragment of hand-grenade effected a semi-solution of the continuity of one of my Achilles tendons and put a period on my further usefulness in that branch of the service. The ‘air’ was still open to me, however, and, as I had already dabbled in flying,--I was the first man to pilot an aeroplane across the Plate estuary,--I got a commission almost immediately, and so lost very little time.”
“But your ‘lily-white’ face and hands,” I pressed. “I never heard that the air had a bleaching effect on the complexion.”
“Oh--that--” (Horne looked absently at a blue-veined hand and shuffled uneasily), “that must have come from my spell of ‘C.H.’--confined in hospital. Got knocked up a bit again. Flying over Belgium. Got shot down and hit the edge of Holland a trifle too hard when I volplaned over the boundary. Telescoped a few vertebræ, that’s all. Now, be a good chap and stop asking questions and jump in with me and come along to the Club.”
Horne waited for me while I picked up a few promised figures at the “Lloyd-Georgery,” as he facetiously called the new Ministry of Munitions in Whitehall Gardens, and then took me up to one of the Service clubs in Piccadilly. There, without giving me further chance to “get him up into the air,” he launched at once into news and reminiscence of the Plate and the Pampas. When I left him at six, we had talked for close on two hours without more than the most casual reference to events of the war.
“A keen patriot, like all the rest of these young Britons who have flocked home from overseas to fight for their country,” I reflected as I sauntered down through Green Park; “but certainly not keen on his work.” I even speculated as to whether or not Horne might be in some sort of trouble in the service. Nothing else seemed to account for the man’s reticence regarding everything connected with his special activities.
A few days later Horne called me up to ask me to dine with him that evening at a famous old restaurant in the Strand.
“‘S----’s’ is a bit more ‘merry and bright’ than this old tomb of a Club,” he said, “and a few of the Flying Corps chaps who are in the habit of rendezvousing there while in London on leave you’ll find well worth knowing.”
The gathering was even more informal than I had anticipated. One of the long tables, it appeared, was set aside for “R.F.C.” officers and their friends, and these dropped in by twos and threes, as suited their convenience, all the way from seven to ten o’clock.
There were half-a-dozen men at the table when Horne and I entered, and all of these--they had stalls for a new “revue”--presently took their leave. One of the group was a South African, one a New Zealander, and two Australians. The latter we found bent over the racing page of the Sydney _Bulletin_, while the New Zealander was evidently trying to persuade the Africander that a dairy herd near Wellington offered better prospects than a general farm in Rhodesia. One of the Australians, whose family was interested in an importing house, lingered behind a moment to ask me if I thought the war was going to force up the price of American agricultural machinery in foreign markets. None of them said a word about flying, and Horne volunteered no more than that they were all “good men--that little chap from New Zealand really ‘topping.’”
Horne, with the fleshpots of Argentina in his mind, ordered solidly and lengthily, and three or four more officers had “wolfed” hasty meals of roast beef and whisky-and-soda before our _Chateaubriand_ (which represents the nearest Anglo-French equivalent to the _carne asado_ of the Pampas) had been done to its proper turn over the coals. These, like the others, rattled on about the music-halls, the homeland, the “rotten London weather”--anything and everything, in fact, save the war in general and the war in the air in particular.
One, it is true,--he had come from France only that afternoon,--in accounting for a bandaged hand, did mention something about getting a finger jammed under the belt of his machine-gun; but it seemed to occur to no one to inquire what he had been shooting at, or whether or not he had hit it, or any of a dozen or so other things concerning which I, for one, was at once consumed with interest.
By nine all of those with theatre or other engagements had come and gone, and the eight or ten still seated at the table were leisurely diners with the evening on their hands. Yet not even among these unhurried ones was there evident any inclination to talk of their work. On the contrary, I fancied I discerned an inclination to avoid, to “side-step” it. When they were reminiscent, it was the friends and events of their old life--“trekking,” “caravanning,” “hiking,” “mushing”; Arctic midnights and tropic dawns; strange odds and ends of adventure by land and sea--that they called up. And when they spoke of the present, it was in connection with little happenings incident to their leaves--with the comparative merits of “kit” shops, Turkish baths, “revue” favourites, the pros and cons of drink restriction, and the extortionate charges of dentists.
Yet every man of them appeared true to what I have since come to recognise as a rapidly-developing type--the “Flying Type.” The army aviator of to-day is picked for his quickness of mind and body, and the first thing that strikes you about him is a sort of feline, wound-up-spring alertness. Then you note his reticence, the cool reserve of a man whose lot it is to express himself in deeds rather than words. And lastly there is the quiet seriousness, verging almost on sadness, of the man who must hold himself ready to look Death between the eyes at any moment, and yet keep his mind detached for other things.
It was the youngest, and therefore the least “formed,” officer of the lot--a lad who had left his cacao plantation in Trinidad to come home and fight--who was responsible for the only “shop” discussion of the evening. Noting that he was eating but little, and constantly passing his hand over his temples, some one asked him banteringly if he was “homesick or only lovesick.”
“Neither,” he answered, relaxing his set lips in a forced smile. “Had a bit of an accident yesterday, and have had a deuce of a headache ever since. Can’t for the life of me make out whether it comes from going up too high or coming down too quick. I went up higher and came down faster than ever before in my experience. Landed all right, but ever since I’ve felt as though I were being blown up by a tire-pump that was driving air into every capillary and nerve-tip. My head feels as though some one was opening up a jack-screw inside of it. Suppose I should have gone to the hospital and found out what was wrong, but I didn’t want to spoil my leave. Maybe some of you chaps can tell me why I feel as though I had to keep holding my head together to stop its flying to pieces,” he concluded, pressing the heels of his hands to his temples to offset the seeming pressure from within.
Every one stopped talking and leaned forward with interest, and for an instant I thought the curtain was going to drop and reveal something of the experiences, if not the minds, of those khaki-clad sphinxes of the air. Horne’s coldly professional diagnosis dashed the hope. “Altitude,” he pronounced laconically. “Got over twelve thousand, didn’t you? Over thirteen thousand? That accounts for it. And you went up wide-open, trying to take ‘pride of place’ away from a Fokker, I suppose? Of course. And when you got there you began to feel like a deep-sea fish looks when you bring him up out of the kelp-beds and his own air-bladders blow him up? A man can go up fifteen thousand feet by rail or on foot without more than a shortness of breath and occasional nose-bleed. But not every man--and not even every seasoned flyer--can stand jumping up to twelve thousand feet in the half-hour that some of the new machines can negotiate that height in. The difficulty’s almost entirely physical, and it all depends upon how a man is made whether or not his flesh and blood will accommodate themselves to the suddenly reduced pressure of the atmosphere. There’s no growing used to it. If it ‘gets’ you once, it’s pretty sure to do it again. At the best you may only have a bad headache and a sort of ‘boiled-owl’ feeling for a week. At the worst you faint, lose control of your machine, and are listed among the casualties of ’cause unknown.’ Did _you_ lose control, by any chance?”